ESSAY

Adventures In Good And Evil

What makes some of us saints and some of us sinners? The evolutionary roots of morality.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

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  • Posted By: Citizen6 @ 05/02/2009 3:14:28 PM

    From M Scott Peck Wickapedia Article

    refrencing the book "People of the Lie"

    An evil person:
    Is consistently self deceiving, lying to themselves about their faults in order to maintain a self image of perfection
    Is willing to psychologically destroy others rather than face their own faults
    Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else ("their insensitivity toward him was selective")
    Abuses political (emotional) power ("the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion")
    Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so
    Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency
    Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoat)
    Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

    To me this some metrics to apply to the Science of Evil

  • Posted By: ELIASID @ 05/01/2009 10:32:11 PM

    The sciencie has proved lot of things about our glorius body and creativity, but not the individualy of our owns feelings,
    that means that everything is on the God's wise, the CREATION has demons (bad spirits) those persons whose acts are
    oposites to good manersbecause them, luckyly they will be destroyed soon and with the mayor leader.
    There is the BIBLE that explains everything, even things we can not see along with new CREATIONS.

  • Posted By: ELIASID @ 05/01/2009 10:21:04 PM

    If the studies does not make understand conductual behavior based on evolution, turn on Creation, everybody has a
    SPIRIT, even animals the God's SPIRIT come upon us and the forgiveness is there, God paid for us. easy? sure.

  • Posted By: perryb @ 05/01/2009 2:37:01 PM

    Morality is 'located' here as 'deeply embedded in our evolution'. Completely overlooked in this respect is the evolved and more probable property of congregationality -and the fact of manifest life that goes with it, of warm-blooded vertebrates in general. -It is hard-wired congregationality -probably sexual in origin, that can more or less easily be extrapolated to account for essentially all phenomena discussed in this essay.
    perryb@condition.org
    http://www.condition.org/humexis.htm

  • Posted By: distantsmoke @ 04/29/2009 8:26:55 PM

    youknowben,
    I completely disagree with you and your logic (logic is a mathmatical process, not a gut feeling). Simply because something is a part of Nature does not mean it has to be embraced. Have you ever had a tooth pulled because it had a cavity? (Many ancient Egyptians died from tooth decay.)

    By your logic, since tooth decay is a natural process, no one should ever have a tooth pulled for any reason. They should simply accept the whole package, to include the inevitable death. No one should ever have an appendix removed, or a diseased and damaged heart replaced.

    But as many liberal/progressives do, I am sure you are more than happy to "cherry pick" your "logical" arguments.

    And I can already hear the screaming and personal defamation against me for having the nerve to point out (what I see as) the flaw in your logic.

    Evil can be both natural and abhorred.

    And this is the first time I have ever heard Moses described as a murderer. I'm not saying it isn't true. Was this murder in self defense, or did he just wake up one day and decide, "What the heck, I think I'll start killing people today"?

  • Posted By: youknowben @ 04/28/2009 11:53:08 PM

    If good and evil evolved, they are natural. If they are natural, then what we call evil is actually just a part of life. But the very word evil makes us recoil because it sounds so hideous and abhorrent. Either evil is natural and to be embraced along with the rest of nature, and the Holocaust right along with it, or evil is not natural and is to be abhorred, and the Holocaust right along with it.

    If you take the second view, though, you are left saying that evil is not a normal part of the human experience, that it is foreign; and then the question becomes not "what IS wrong?" but "what WENT wrong" - and that is a question which an aristocratic murderous pasture-minded revolutionary named Moses dealt with some 34 centuries ago. He handled it in narrative form, "in language that peasants could understand, but the truths he articulated there have confounded the most brilliant thinkers ever since."

  • Posted By: youknowben @ 04/28/2009 11:46:38 PM

    If good and evil evolved, they are natural. If they are natural, then what we call evil is actually just a part of life. But the very word evil makes us recoil because it sounds so hideous and abhorrent. So: Either evil is natural and to be embraced along with the rest of nature, and the Holocaust right along with it, or evil is not natural and is to be abhorred, and the Holocaust right along with it.

    If you take the second view, though, you are left saying that evil is not a normal part of the human experience, that it is foreign; and then the question becomes not "what IS wrong?" but "what WENT wrong?" Why is evil here and when did it arrive? - and that is a question which an aristocratic murderous pasture-minded revolutionary named Moses dealt with some 34 centuries ago. He handled it in narrative form, "in language that peasants could understand, but the truths he articulated there have confounded the most brilliant thinkers ever since."

  • Posted By: MagicDragon @ 04/28/2009 8:59:50 PM

    No bad, no good! Duality! Enantiodromia. We can't have one without the other. The trick is to stay in the middle between extremes!

  • Posted By: Alamo_Jack @ 04/28/2009 8:31:59 PM

    It's amazing what passes for science/journalism these days. Evolutionary roots of morality? Is there any direct scientific link? Because monkeys show compassion we can safely close the book on this question? This article throws around a lot of ideas, but NO ONE has proven that morality is the product of evolutionary change. Where's the proof?

  • Posted By: olderwiser @ 04/28/2009 5:07:35 PM

    There was a marine boot camp sergeant quoted decades ago during one of our wars to the effect that you could give him any tender mama's boy and he would make a killer out of him in a few months of training. Somehow this article brought that memory back.

  • Posted By: Libricrat @ 04/28/2009 1:58:10 PM

    I like the direction they are going with this. Id be very curious to see the results if they studied the brains of good average people that didn't get into trouble donated to charity etc vs. hardened criminals & murderers.

  • Posted By: Simpleton @ 04/27/2009 12:06:15 AM

    Gandhi was a shrewd politician whose stated approach to Hitler's final solution was a suicidal one. He proposed that Jews should die in protest to impress upon Hitler a sense of humanity.

    Hitler would have been delighted had the Jews taken that approach. Would have saved him the gas ovens.

    Hitler of course was a Christian. Elected democratically by a overwhelmingly Christian Germany who cheered his every move. The Vatican signed a concordat with Hitler so as look the other way.

    http://www.nobeliefs.com/Hitler1.htm

    Revisionist would idiotically suggest that Hitler was an atheist. These people are worse than idiots -- they are liars and idiots.

    And if ahimsa means not killing any living creatures, what do you think a plant is? A dead creature?

    • Posted By: jbz7879 @ 04/27/2009 9:55:01 AM

      true
      not only was hitler a christian but he was like mr .bush a democratically elected leader -

      also do not forget the controversial gandhism actually refused to support war effort equating british imperialism with nazi fascism -
      for gandhi and indian congress -the fascists and brit imperialists were the same -
      it is indeed a microvision and yet a historical travesty that gandhi and nehru actually have equated the the nazis with brits -it is amusing to go over these sheer follies of these men who can only be judged by history as misguided -
      it seems simpleton is not so simple -but rather knows a tad bit more than the esteemed writer here about saints and sinners -
      at the time when jinnah supported the war effort against nazis he was condemned as a traitor and terrorist by congress -
      alas the word terror is rather extant and needs to be exhumed in it's eloquent usage -encore

      • Posted By: paproudmom @ 04/28/2009 12:25:55 PM

        Actually Hilter was raised a Christian that does not mean he was a practicing Christian as an adult. He also with cabinet approval seized power unconstitutionally not through an election to become Fuhe. To equate this to a US Presidential election is totally without merit.

  • Posted By: jbz7879 @ 04/27/2009 6:41:24 AM

    i agree with simpletons consensus about gandhi -he was indeed a politician first though he was a kind man but absurd at times too-
    when he actually decided NOT TO SUPPORT THE WAR EFFORT AGAINST HITLER HE ACTUALLY BECAME A PARTISAN =
    IN FACT ONLY JINNAH OPENLY CONDEMNED HITLER IN THOSE DARK HOURS .
    GANDHI was a good man but he had the deadly congress to satisfy and also the controversial ideology of ahinsa to follow which ended in his own assassination at the hands of hindu extremists -whether that makes him a martyr or a saint is rather a questionable view to uphold .

    • Posted By: sms29s66 @ 04/27/2009 12:44:32 PM

      Can you really say that his refusal to support the war was equivalent to nazi-partisonship? Would you say the same about the Quakers who refused to participate in the War Between the States? They certainly did not support slavery.

  • Posted By: Brien Comerford @ 04/26/2009 2:57:01 PM

    Mahatma Gandhi is arguably the greatest humanitarian that ever lived. He was a paragon of social justice and reverence for all life. He adhered to the creed of ahiimsa which means not harming any living creature. Gandhi was a humane vegetarian who tried to bring people together evidenced by calling himself a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew.
    Brien Comerford

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